Hollywood Treats Hackers Pretty Well

angry tapir writes "According to Damian Gordon, a lecturer at the Dublin Institute of Technology, hackers are treated pretty well by movie-makers. Gordon studied 50 movies, produced over five decades, to help write an academic paper for the International Journal of Internet Technology and Secured Transactions. The results amazed him. In the movies, most hackers aren't teenaged whiz-kids. They're professionals, over 30 years old, who work in IT."

Comments

You call that well treated?

[Rysc]

The person's themselves may be realistic in terms of age and profession, but nothing else is well treated. Movies continue to routinely portray unrealistic and nonsensical computer interactions and capabilities, which is particularly harmful to a depiction of a hacker.

Re:You call that well treated?

[Manip]

While hackers are often shown to have super-technical abilities that make no sense, so are the "good guys." I think to some degree it kind of counter-balances the whole thing.

Computers/technology isn't accurate in films but that is a small part of a much larger science rant in which all of the fields of science are abused for your viewing pleasure, biology, chemistry, engineering, and psychics.

Heck even psychology is abused in movies and that is borderline pseudoscience anyway....

Re:You call that well treated?

[ShiningSomething]

It's the same phenomenon at play in journalism. The more you know about a topic, the more you realize they have no idea what they are talking about.

Re:You call that well treated?

[sourcerror]

Please tell me, how psycho-analysis traces back phenomenons to neural networks? Or transactional psychology?
Sorry to disappoint you but the science that researches neural networks is not psychology, but machine-learning. Psychologists don't know shit about neural networks.

On the other hand psychiatry dwelves into bio-chemistry and in the anatomy of brain, but it's a completely different profession, they're basically doctors, not some liberal-art majors. They might have more knowledge about neural networks as well.

I can't resist, but link to Feynamann.

Re:News Flash!

[Ltap]

No. It provides a more entertaining product... for stupid people. Anyone who has any knowledge of the subject matter or is intelligent enough to note the inconsistencies will be put off by it and dislike the writers for it.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind that he's using a broad definition of hacker. Captain Kirk in Wrath of Khan qualifies for hacking into the Reliant and lowering Khan's shields.

Re:News Flash!

[0racle]

If they had to stick with real depictions of, well in this case hackers, every movie about it would look like Office Space and Dilbert. We've seen those so apparently no other movie about or related to the subject can ever be made.

Most people in any profession, if they can't let go of their insistence on reality, dislike or down right hate movie portrayals of what they do.

Sneakers

[jgtg32a]

Sneakers is the best hacking movie ever.

Re:Sneakers

[evilviper]

Sneakers is the best hacking movie ever.

"War Games"

Serious subject.
Culturally significant.
Perhaps the most realistic "hacking" in Hollywood history.
All tech involved was just a small step removed from the real thing.
Dated today, but holds up very well.

Re:Sneakers

[Chris Burke]

Except it wasn't silly, it was one of the best examples of defeating a computer through logic ever. It wasn't just some self-contradictory piece of logic that made Joshua go into an infinite loop or go offline while saying "does not compute". It was a challenge to beat itself at Tic-Tac-Toe with a lesson which Joshua learned and then intuitively applied to Thermonuclear War. It wasn't a logic-bomb, it was logic. Joshua learned that nuclear war was futile.

Compare with all the examples from E.g. Star Trek where the contradictory logic causes the computers to fail.

Personally, I think that trope page should list Wargames as averting the trope. :P

Re:Search burbling, no cursors, huge fonts

[mcgrew]

I try to allow for artistic license, but real computers DON'T MAKE CUTE R2D2 NOISES WHEN THEY'RE SEARCHING!

Well, they CAN, you know, if you want them to. I once had a boss named Dave and changed all his Windows sounds to samples of HAL from 2001. "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid you can't do that."

Re:Yes, but

[dangitman]

In fact Sneakers is probably the best hacker movie to date. Wargames is certainly in the top five, too.

Heretic.

Wargames in the top five hacker movies? Nonsense. Wargames is the greatest film ever made. No need to restrict the statement to "hacker movies." Get out of here with your foolish Sneakers superiority complex.

Re:News Flash!

[dangitman]

I don't think this is true at all. Movies like Wargames manage to be decently realistic

Yes, a kid having conversations with an intelligent computer, who then evades authorities and escapes from the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD facility, and nuclear war is averted which the computer is convinced of the futility of war... is decently realistic. For unusual values of "realistic."